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To: Swordmaker

There’s a college on Mackinac Island?


8 posted on 04/27/2017 10:25:57 AM PDT by Buckeye McFrog
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To: Buckeye McFrog
There’s a college on Mackinac Island?

There was. . . Mackinac College. It's where the Up With People movement was founded back in the 1960s. They graduated one class. The Midwest Accreditation Association said it was finest college they ever accredited with the best faculty they ever saw with three Nobel laureates in a faculty of ~100 for ~300 students from all over the world. One professor had been a signatory to the UN Charter. plus two Olympic Gold Medalists, and the Poet Laureate of England. For various reasons not really associated with academics or tuition, but rather with poor management choices and a unilateral, un-reversable decision by the college's president, it went bankrupt in 1970. After that, the college limped along one more year to graduate its first and last senior class.

It is possible you've even seen part of the campus of Mackinac College. If you've ever seen the movie "Somewhere In Time" with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, the theater where Seymour was playing was the college's movie/drama theater where I worked as movie projectionist and prop manager while I was a student at Mackinac. The movie was made about five years post college years. . . and was actually completely filmed at the campus there because the college had the world's second largest sound stage attached to that theater. We used it as a gymnasium. Ten feature length movies were made there. To give you an idea of the size of the building, back in the 1950s, one of those movies required a scene in which a plane was to take off. They did not quite do that, but they did disassemble a Ford Tri-motor airplane, reassembled it inside the sound stage and then taxied it around the floor of the sound stage to get the effect they wanted.

The building had it's own power generation plant to power the lights. On occasion we fired up the power plant and provided power to the island's inhabitants gratis when power failed from the mainland.

And yes, it was cold in Northern Michigan. We were iced in from January through March as the only way off the Island was by private plane flying to Petoskey International Airport (courtesy of the fact that there was ONE North Central Airlines flight to Canada every other day from Petoskey airport!)

The college campus is now a resort called "The Inn at Mackinac" on the opposite end of the island from the Grand Hotel.

As for many now defunct colleges, you can now BUY a degree from Mackinac College for $695, and for an additional $695 the company selling that bogus degree with provide you an equally counterfeit set of transcripts for classes you never took and which were never offered or taught. They will even sell you a PhD (Piled higher, Deeper) degree for an additional payment, something that Mackinac College was never accredited to award!

30 posted on 04/27/2017 11:02:21 AM PDT by Swordmaker (This tag line is a Microsoft insult free zone... but if the insults to Mac users continue...)
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